Bloggers: KISS — make it easy for your fans to read your posts

Reprinted from Phyllis Zimbler Miller’s blog posts at the LA Internet Business Examiner.

Excluding the really famous bloggers, almost all other bloggers are 1) constantly trying to attract more readers to their blogs and 2) have these readers consistently read new posts.

There are several strategies that can be used for one or both of these objectives: SEO (search engine optimization) of the blog, contests, giveaways, links from the blogrolls of other bloggers, links from tweets in Twitter, etc.

Yet there’s one basic strategy that many of us bloggers don’t often consider:

KISS — Keep It Simple

Recently I was asked by a book marketing colleague to review a post for his own site before the post went live. He emailed that it was the most controversial post he had written so he wanted another set of eyes on it.

I read the long post – and then told him to lose the entire first page. Because he was writing predictions, he apparently felt compelled to first wander all over the landscape justifying his ideas BEFORE making the predictions.

I told him to lose the first page and start the post immediately with the predictions – because that’s what people would want to read. If they first had to wade through his meanderings, they’d never stick around long enough to get to the predictions (which were quite worthwhile).

We all tend to do this – write “intros” to our posts that go on and on before we get to the relevant information. But our blog readers have so many choices that they usually won’t stick around if we don’t immediately get to the point.

Thus it’s a good business blogging strategy to jump right into the meat of your post, say the most important points, and then add as a wrap-up at the end some additional comments if you feel compelled to do so.

And here are my additional comments for this post:

• Keep the whole post short

• Break up long paragraphs into shorter ones

• Use a font size big enough for people to read easily

• Use a blog format with columns narrow enough to make it easy for people’s eyes to track the text being read

• Use bullet points where appropriate